


better to leave (your love is confusing)

by shineyma



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-12
Updated: 2018-12-12
Packaged: 2019-09-16 18:53:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16959606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shineyma/pseuds/shineyma
Summary: Only Ward can explain himself. It's just too bad he doesn't seem interested in doing so.





	better to leave (your love is confusing)

**Author's Note:**

> Ohmygosh, did I finish a fic? I DID! *confetti* 
> 
> Y'all, the struggle is so real these days. But after fighting this fic since MAY, it is finally complete. And, just in case those of you who follow me on tumblr thought I was a total flake, it's in response to the sunday six meme I did...a month ago. So I'm not a TOTAL flake. Just a little bit of one.
> 
> Anyway. Thanks for reading and, as always, please be gentle if you review! <3

Jemma’s first reaction to the sight of the Centipede soldier is pure fear. Horrible and overwhelming, it freezes her in her tracks and steals her breath and leaves her utterly defenseless against the gut punch of betrayal and confusion that follows, because Ward—

Ward is in the lab, too, only he’s not fighting the Centipede soldier. He’s _giving him orders_.

“—avoid the southeast side,” he’s saying. Jemma can barely hear him over the pounding of her heart. “You have maybe fifteen minutes to get out of here before— _shit_.”

He’s seen her.

So has the soldier, but he only has time to take a single step forward before Ward’s hand hits his chest.

“Go,” he orders. “I’ll take care of her.”

“Yes, sir,” the soldier says—says to _Ward_ , who’s on her _team_ , who was _shot_ by Centipede less than two months ago, _what is happening_ —and salutes.

Salutes. He _salutes_ Ward. As though Ward is a superior officer and not the enemy.

Jemma should be contacting the team, shouldn’t she? She should tell the others—that Centipede is here, that there’s at least one soldier on the premises, that Ward is _giving him orders_ and he’s _accepting them_.

But her hand stays by her side, slack in her shock. Even if she could lift it to activate her comm, she doesn’t believe she could speak.

She’s frozen just inside the room (it was only a few steps past the doorway that she saw them, Ward and the soldier, standing in calm conversation instead of fighting), and so the soldier is forced to slip by her on his way out the door. The presence of cabinets along both walls means there isn’t much space for him to maneuver; his shoulder brushes hers, and the brief physical contact hits her like a splash of cold water to the face.

“ _What_ ,” she says.

Ward winces. “Yeah, I can’t explain this.”

“You—you’re working with Centipede?” she finally manages. “How could—they _tortured_ Coulson!”

“I know,” he says, tone pitched to soothing. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re _sorry_?” She can’t even believe her ears. “That’s it?”

“It’s all I’ve got,” he says, and then his hands are on her shoulders, and Jemma’s heart skips a beat.

She noticed him moving closer, of course—she was looking straight at him; she could hardly miss it—but it only now occurs to her that she perhaps should have been retreating as he did so. That perhaps she should have _run_ instead of standing here and stammering at him like a ninny. That she should have forced through her shock and commed the team.

It’s just that the idea of Ward—her protector, her friend, her _teammate_ —as a threat is ludicrous, and so the thought that she should respond to him as one simply never crossed her mind until this very moment.

He told the soldier he’d take care of her. How does he mean to do that?

“Ward,” she says—has to force past the sudden lump in her throat, and her voice is thin for it, “what—”

“I’m sorry,” he says again, and then there’s a cold barrel against her stomach and the world is lost to a flash of blue light.

 

 

 

A heartbeat or an hour later, Jemma wakes to a pounding head and an aching heart. That only one hurt is physical is irrelevant; they’re equally painful, and it takes her a long moment to collect herself enough to open her eyes.

When she does, pain is forgotten in favor of confusion.

She’s still in the lab.

She doesn’t know where she was _expecting_ to wake up, really—a Centipede cell? A transport vehicle? Not at all?—but it certainly wasn’t here, on the floor of the very lab where she found Ward conspiring with the enemy.

Yet here she is. Further into the room than she ever got under her own power, yes, but it’s undoubtedly the same lab.

All right. Well. Hmm.

Completely at a loss, she takes stock of her situation. She’s on the floor, laid out along some of the cabinets—her right wrist is zip-tied to one of the handles, which will make leaving difficult—the softness beneath her cheek proves to be a leather jacket ( _Ward’s_ leather jacket), left balled up for her as a pillow—there’s a bottle of water just within reach—her comm is gone.

Oh. That’s not good.

“Hello?” she calls. “Fitz? Skye? Anyone?”

There’s no response…but then, that’s not surprising. This (supposedly) abandoned Centipede base is enormous: six stories and tens of thousands of square feet. Even if the team is searching for her—which they must be, by now—the chances of them being in earshot are very, very small.

“Well, then,” she says to herself. “You’ll just have to find your own way out, won’t you?”

Even restrained as she is, she can reach quite a few of the cabinets—especially as she’s only tied to _one_ handle, which means the door can open and allow her to move that much further from where she woke—but her search proves fruitless. Every single one is empty, as are the drawers above them.

The team that swept this lab before, while Coulson was missing, was obviously extremely thorough in packing up all the evidence. Not so much as a spare cotton swab remains, let alone something sharp enough to cut through the plastic holding her wrist.

“Drat.”

Of course, it is _possible_ to break through a zip-tie. Ward can do it—she’s seen it with her own eyes. But an experimental tug only hurts her wrist, and she decides against trying. The others will be searching for her; she only needs to wait.

 

 

 

And wait.

 

 

 

All told, it’s probably a good two hours before she finally hears the first, faint cries of her name…and Ward’s.

They don’t know, she realizes. Ward must have just slipped away, leaving the team to worry about the both of them. That explains why he took her comm and restrained her, at least—it gave him that much longer to get away.

“Here!” she shouts as loudly as she can. “I’m here!”

“Simmons!” It’s Skye, and the hoarseness of her voice doesn’t disguise the relief in it. “Where are you?!”

“Here!” she shouts again. She wishes she had more to offer, but while she’s certain there was a lab number written on the door, she can’t bring it to mind. “In here!”

They have to shout back and forth a few more times, but within minutes, Skye is rushing into the lab.

“I’ve got Simmons,” she reports into her comm, even as she falls to her knees next to Jemma. “Fifth floor, lab 527. She’s okay—right?” Her eyes (wider and wilder than Jemma’s ever seen them; she must really have been frightened) sweep over Jemma. “You’re okay?”

“I’m fine,” Jemma promises. “But Ward—”

“Where is he?” Skye demands, craning her neck as if she expects to find him hiding behind a counter. “Is he hurt? What _happened_?”

Jemma bites her tongue. It’s bad enough she’s going to have to voice aloud the horrid truth about Ward’s loyalties; she doesn’t want to have to say it over and over.

She’ll wait until the others get here to tell them.

“He’s…not hurt,” she prevaricates.

Of course, even prevaricating is beyond her ability to do convincingly, so Skye’s eyes narrow at once. “What aren’t you telling me? Where _is_ he?”

She’s spared answering—for the moment—by Fitz’s rather loud arrival; in all the fuss of him clattering in, hugging her, demanding to know whether she’s hurt, and tutting over her restrained wrist, it’s easy to pretend she’s forgotten the question.

That’s the only easy thing about the situation. Jemma’s heart aches all over again when Fitz demands, “Who would do this?” of her wrist.

“Never mind that,” she says, “will you get this off of me?”

“With what?” Skye, successfully distracted for the moment, asks. “Do you see any scissors around here?”

“Fitz has some,” Jemma informs her.

He starts. “I do?”

Poor thing—she really must have given him an awful fright, for him to have forgotten already. But then, Jemma would be terrified herself if _he_ suddenly went off comms in the middle of a mission.

“You do,” she confirms (a touch shakily, perhaps; Skye narrows her eyes again). “You put the DWARF maintenance kit in your coat pocket, remember?”

“Oh! Right!” Fitz fumbles for it at once, and by the time May and Coulson have arrived and asked after Jemma’s well-being, she’s been freed from the ziptie and cabinet both.

In one sense, it’s a relief, as her wrist was beginning to get quite sore.

In another, however, she regrets the ease of the solution; if it had been harder to free her, the distraction might have lasted longer.

(Although perhaps not—after all, Ward is just as beloved to their team as she.)

Either way, Coulson brings his absence back into sharp focus mere seconds after his arrival.

“What happened?” he asks. “Do you know where Ward is?”

Jemma has neither excuse nor reason left to stall—and it would be cruel, surely, to continue to prevaricate, to let the others think that he may perhaps be wounded or even dead when really he’s fine.

She has to tell them.

“He’s,” she starts, and then pauses to clear her throat when her voice cracks. “He’s with Centipede.”

Her mistake is obvious at once; Coulson rears back in horror, while Skye slaps a hand over her mouth.

“He’s been captured?” May asks sharply.

“No,” Jemma says, raising her voice to be heard over Fitz’s curse. “No, I’m sorry, but it’s—it’s worse than that. He’s _with_ Centipede. He’s working for them.”

The first declaration was met with distress. This one is met only with blank looks.

“What are you talking about?” Skye asks, tone almost politely puzzled—as though she thinks perhaps Jemma has switched topics, and is referring to someone else entirely.

They’re all so confused. They don’t understand.

Jemma wouldn’t, either, if she hadn’t seen it herself.

“He’s a traitor,” she says—whispers, really, as her voice gives out on her. “I’m sorry, but Ward is working for Centipede.”

“No,” Fitz says at once. “No, don’t be ridiculous, Simmons. You’ve misunderstood something—”

“I walked in on him giving _orders_ to a Centipede soldier, Fitz!” she snaps at him. It’s guilt, perhaps (guilt that _she_ must be the one to break the others’ hearts, the way Ward broke hers) that makes her tone so harsh. “He _confessed_.”

Coulson takes a slow, deep breath. “What did he say exactly?”

Jemma closes her eyes—against the pain on his face, the betrayal on Skye’s, the fury on May’s—and forces herself to remember the precise moment.

“When I confronted him, he said that he couldn’t explain,” she says clearly. “Then he apologized—twice—and shot me with the night-night gun. I woke up zip-tied to this cabinet, with my comm missing.”

Fitz jumps on that at once. “Why would he just leave you here if he was Centipede?”

“Hey, yeah,” Skye agrees, brightening. “Wouldn’t it be better to kidnap you? Or! Or the Centipede soldier could’ve kidnapped you and Ward could’ve stayed and we never would’ve known what happened!”

“Exactly,” Fitz says. “He’s not Centipede—he can’t be. There’s something else going on!”

She wishes she could believe that, she really does. They’re not wrong—she was surprised herself to wake here, wasn’t she?—and certainly leaving her water to drink and his own jacket as a pillow aren’t actions she would expect from the sort of man who could leave his commanding officer to be tortured for three days, but…

But she can’t forget the look on his face, the way he winced—his careless admission of having no good explanation. And the image of the Centipede soldier _saluting_ him may as well be burned into the backs of her eyelids.

Then again…

Jemma looks down at the jacket that has somehow come to be in her lap. It truly doesn’t make sense. And a very large part of her wants to believe that Skye and Fitz are right; more than that, it rails at her for doubting Ward. He’s her teammate, her _friend_. He’s saved all their lives a dozen times at least—and he _jumped out of the Bus_ for her!

How can she so easily dismiss him?

“I can’t explain it,” she admits after a long moment of struggle. “All I know is what I saw, and what I _saw_ was Ward being saluted and obeyed by one of the Clairvoyant’s soldiers.”

“The soldiers!” Fitz exclaims, pointing at her as though she’s just agreed with him. “Maybe Ward has one of those bloody—”

“Fitz,” Coulson says softly, laying a hand on his shoulder. (May, Jemma suddenly realizes, is now closer to Skye than she was before. Which is really May’s equivalent of laying a hand on someone’s shoulder.) “Enough.”

Fitz obediently subsides, but his expression is mutinous.

“None of us have answers,” Coulson says. His voice is calm—calmer than his face, certainly. Jemma feels absurdly guilty at his expression (which is rather reminiscent of a kicked puppy), as though _she’s_ the one who knocked out and tied up a teammate. “And sitting here going in circles won’t get us any.”

“What _will_?” Skye demands, a bit tearily.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “But we’ll get our chance to find out. If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that we haven’t seen the last of Ward.”

 

 

 

Coulson is entirely correct. That’s _not_ the last they see of Ward. In fact, they see him quite frequently in the following months: on the remains of the security footage at a SHIELD facility which is overrun and destroyed, disappearing into a car just as they arrive at the scene of an investigation…Jemma even thinks she spots him outside the trauma center in which she spends weeks after Italy.

(To say nothing of the fact that his picture is all over every announcement board and news bulletin in SHIELD. His betrayal is a very big deal. It’s not often SHIELD’s best agents go rogue…or so Jemma thinks _then_.)

Still, it’s only ever in glimpses that they see him—certainly never long enough to so much as shout at him, let alone gain any answers.

The next chance she has to really, truly _interact_ with him comes, naturally, on the worst day of her life.

 

 

 

Jemma doesn’t think things can get any worse. She and Kagan are being held at gunpoint by Hydra— _Hydra_!—agents, who were SHIELD agents all of twenty minutes ago and who now are arguing amongst themselves as to whether or not they’ll get in trouble for, quote, having some fun with her. Jemma was disgusted when the argument started; now, as they seem to be reaching a consensus that they _won’t_ be in trouble, disgust has given way to gut-clenching terror.

The whole situation is absolutely horrible…and then Ward swaggers in.

That’s really the only word for it: he _swaggers_. She’s never seen anyone do any such thing in real life, but there he is, just—just _swanning in_ like he owns the place.

The Ward she knew on the Bus never looked like he does now. Beneath all of her fear, she feels that now-familiar ache.

“Well,” Ward says brightly, and somehow that’s all it takes to silence the arguing traitors. “What have we here?”

No one answers him. Kagan’s eyes narrow as the silence stretches out.

“Simmons,” he whispers. “Isn’t that the old me?”

Kagan, it must be said, isn’t the best at whispering. His question is far too loud—loud enough to draw Ward closer.

“I’d like to clarify that _you’re_ the new _me_ ,” he says, looking his replacement over with a frown, “but honestly, you’re just not good enough.”

Kagan scowls. “I’m twice the specialist you could ever even _hope_ to be, you fucking traitor.”

Something flickers over Ward’s face, and for a moment Jemma fears—but no. Far from lashing out, he laughs.

“See,” he says, “that’d be a lot more believable if you hadn’t managed to get Simmons captured by Hydra.” He shakes his head with a scoff. “Even I managed to avoid that, and I _work_ for the bastards. What’s your excuse?”

As awful as Kagan is at whispering, he’s that good at delivering absolutely devastating insults, and Jemma’s sure the one he snaps at Ward now is a thing of beauty. It’s only too bad she misses it under the sound of the sudden ringing in her ears.

“Centipede is part of Hydra,” she says, rather faintly, to herself.

It’s not as though it’s terribly surprising. It’s very nearly predictable, actually, and she’s certain she would have concluded as much herself soon enough—she might have done already, if not for the fact that she hasn’t had the chance to think about anything that wasn’t directly in front of her in hours.

She wishes she had. Somehow, it’s more heartbreaking like this—hearing it straight from Ward’s own mouth that he’s one of _them_.

“Yeah,” he says, regarding her with an unreadable expression. “’Fraid so.”

Dismissing Kagan—to Kagan’s visible offense—he focuses in on Jemma, looking her up and down and back up again with an assessing gaze.

“You hurt?” he asks.

All of it—the thrice-over, the question, the tone—are so familiar as to bring tears to Jemma’s eyes. It’s yet more salt in the perpetually open wound that is Ward.

“No,” she says, blinking the sting in her eyes determinedly away. “I’m fine.”

“You sure?” he asks, and suddenly he’s well within her personal space, pushing her hair away from her face to study the still-healing wound along her temple. “I heard what happened in Italy. Should you really be up walking around like this?”

He sounds so honestly concerned. All those old doubts—and with them the guilt of questioning him, of so easily believing the worst—rise back up. The hand she lifted to push him away ends up resting on his chest instead, covering the slow, steady beat of his heart.

Still. Concern or no, he’s _Hydra_ —so Hydra that all the other Hydra agents, who moments ago so carelessly held her fate in their hands, are content to stand around and watch him do what he will.

“As a matter of fact,” she says, very coolly, “no. My doctor advised _against_ being held at gunpoint during my convalescence.”

Ward laughs.

“Yeah,” he says, resting a companionable hand on her shoulder. “Mine always used to do that, too. I never listened, though.”

Entirely reflexively, Jemma rolls her eyes. “I remember.”

“I bet you do.” He squeezes her shoulder—and then suddenly (truly suddenly; there’s no warning, not even the slightest change in his expression or increase in his heartbeat to tip her off), in one astonishingly smooth motion, he shoves her to the ground, draws his gun, turns, and—

—and shoots the nearest Hydra agent in the face.

Bile rises swiftly in Jemma’s throat.

It’s a gruesome sight—so sickening that she can’t even enjoy the man’s death. Not ten minutes ago, she was imagining this very moment, comforting herself with the image of May killing this traitor in particular as he openly looked forward to hurting Jemma in awful, unspeakable ways.

Now that the deed’s been done, however, she feels no satisfaction at all. Just nausea.

And goodness, forget satisfaction—she can’t even _move_. She tries, but her limbs are frozen, weighed down by some combination of the unexpected gore and the sudden resumption of violence above her. All she can do is cower on the floor, listening to the cacophony of gunshots and shouting.

(She can pick Ward’s voice out easily, but Kagan’s isn’t to be heard. She hopes he isn’t dead.

She doesn’t dare look over to find out.)

The mêlée seems to last an eternity, but that’s always the way of these things. It’s probably not even two minutes before Ward is helping her back to her feet.

“Still okay?” he checks.

Overcome by emotion—a confusing tangle of anger, regret, confusion, and the old thrill she always used to get when he looked at her with such worry—Jemma does the first thing that comes to mind: she shoves him.

“No,” she snaps. “Whose side are you even _on_?”

Perhaps it’s not the most appropriate way to thank a man who’s just shot all of one’s captors, but _he just shot all of her captors_. He let her go in that Centipede lab and shot her captors just now, and surely those are the actions of a friend, not an enemy.

And yet no friend would walk away from SHIELD—from the team—for the kind of organization that would order Mike Peterson to throw Jemma off of a second floor balcony.

(Her back twinges at the memory—or perhaps just the exertion. Sarcasm aside, she really _isn’t_ supposed to be spending this long on her feet just yet. It hasn’t even been a month since the disaster in Italy.)

“Hard to say,” Ward answers vaguely. His hand ended up back on her shoulder at some point; now, it moves to her face, cradling her cheek in a way that brings heat to her skin. “Really, though, are you okay? Any injuries?”

In the months since Ward’s departure from the team, Jemma came to believe that the fact of his betrayal had finally helped her shake her hopeless, mortifying crush on him. If nothing else, today has proven that she’s been fooling herself.

He’s so close, and his eyes are so lovely.

As such, her “Only the old ones,” comes out somewhat less cuttingly than she means it to.

“Good,” he says firmly—quite a contrast to the gentle way his thumb sweeps over her cheek. Jemma’s racing heart misses a few beats. “You should probably sit down.”

“Whose side are you on?” she asks again, quite weakly.

Ward ignores her in favor of dropping his hand back to her shoulder and steering her to the nearest chair. Thankfully, doing so requires walking past Kagan—he’s on the floor, motionless but obviously breathing, and when Jemma starts to pull away to kneel next to him, Ward makes an impatient sound.

“He’s fine,” he says. “I used the night-night gun.”

“Really?” Jemma asks, mystified—though she couldn’t say why. Appearance of Centipede allegiance aside, he just killed more than a dozen Hydra agents in order to save her. Why _shouldn’t_ he have left Kagan alive? “Why?”

“Figured it’d upset you if I killed him.” Ward shrugs and gently nudges Jemma with the chair he’s pulled out. “Sit.”

A contrary part of her wants to refuse. Her aching back tells it to shut up.

Jemma sits—and, as if on cue, Ward’s watch beeps.

“That’s my signal,” he says. “Time for me to go.”

“Ward—”

“You tell Coulson to keep a better eye on you,” he orders.

Jemma blinks. “What?”

“You’re on strike three,” he says, somewhat nonsensically. “The next time you walk right into Hydra’s clutches, I’m keeping you.”

“I—what?”

It should probably be the least of her concerns, but Jemma finds that her mind catches on the pronoun in that sentence. _He’s_ keeping her? Not _we_? Not Hydra as a whole, but Ward himself?

Why would he phrase it that way?

Perhaps realizing her confusion (or perhaps just enjoying being so confusing), Ward gives her a very smug smile.

“I’ll see you around, sweetheart,” he says—and then, in his most shocking move to date, he swoops down to press a quick, hard kiss to her lips. “Take care of yourself.”

And just like that, he’s gone—leaving Jemma alone in the nerve center with a dozen dead men, an unconscious teammate, and a blush that absolutely refuses to fade.


End file.
